What is the Bristol Health Services Plan?

The Bristol Health Services Plan is an ambitious, wide ranging scheme to radically modernise and improve NHS health services in the Bristol area. The Plan involves changing how, where and when of how NHS health services are provided to improve the patient experience and treatment outcomes, and bring patient treatment and care closer to home. The Plan covers NHS health services in Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset – all the way from primary and health community care to hospital services.

The overarching goals of the Bristol Health Services Plan are:

• To provide better care closer to home: A far greater proportion of services will be provided in or close to people’s homes.
• Improved service integration that will enable patients to access primary and specialist care in an efficient way.
• The centralisation of some specialist inpatient services such as paediatrics and ENT to enable the concentration on one site of specialist expertise in accordance with national standards.
• To enable a more systematic provision of secondary and tertiary hospital services.
• Flexibility to allow contestability for services with the Independent sector.
• Buildings that provide high quality environments for staff and patients.

Designing Better Buildings

In Bristol, we are investing in our hospitals including redeveloping the Bristol Royal Infirmary and building a brand new major emergency/specialist hospital at Southmead Hospital. We are also building the new South Bristol Community Hospital at Hengrove the new Southmead Community Hospital as well as a purpose built Community Health Centre in Eastville. These investments will provide more modern facilities and equipment, and improved care and treatment for patients and the public.

In South Gloucestershire there will be a new Community Hospital at Frenchay, Cossham Hospital will be redeveloped as well as Thornbury Hospital and there will be new community developments at Yate and Kingswood.

Clevedon Community Hospital will be redeveloped in North Somerset and there will be new community developments at Portishead and Weston-super-Mare.

The new community hospitals and health centres are being developed to ensure that treatment close to home for many patients becomes a reality. Growth in community facilities means that many of patients who currently have to travel to major hospitals for outpatient appointments, tests and treatment will be able to have them in more convenient locations closer to home.

Designing Better Services

The Bristol Health Service Plan is not just about bricks and mortar. We are looking at ways to improve the ‘journey’ each patient makes from the start to finish of their care and treatment.

This can mean bringing some services together, such as the move of all inpatient children’s services to Bristol Royal Hospital for Children. By 2011/12, all children’s inpatient services, including very specialist services (such as burns, plastic surgery and brain injury) will be provided at this hospital, with teams of specialists, supported by trained staff, a full range of essential supporting facilities and the state-of-the art technology.

Completing the concentrating all children’s inpatient services at the Children’s Hospital will enable us to conform to national recommendations and best practice in the NHS whereby children inpatients are treated in a specialist paediatric hospital.